Page 63 of Jayson
And like a magnet drawn to safety, I lean into him like I have no control over my own goddamn body. I just fall into him.
His arm comes around me a moment later. Strong. Steady. Certain. He doesn’t flinch when I press my face into his side, thesob catching low in my throat. He doesn’t pull away when I cling to his shirt like I might drown without him.
For a man I should fear, he’s strangely quiet in the face of grief.
“Keira,” he murmurs, voice low, rough. “What is it? What’s in the book?”
I don’t answer at first. I’m not sure I can. The words feel too sharp in my mouth, like they’ll cut me open if I try to say them out loud.
But Jayson waits. Patient. Unmoving. The monster who tore my world apart is now the only person keeping me upright.
I lift the notebook, my fingers trembling, and open it to that page. I don’t speak. I just show him. His gaze drops to the words.
“I wish I knew what it felt like to be someone’s safe place.”
I feel the moment he absorbs it. The way his breath catches. The way his muscles tense. His hand on my back stills.
“Whose journal is it?”
“We all used to write in it,” I tell him. “There were five of us.”
I don’t tell him that there were five then four, and now I’m only one. After everything that happened with my father, even my friends started dropping off. Everything sort of just made sense after that.
“Riley wrote this. She went missing when we were fourteen.”
Jayson exhales through his nose, like he’s trying to rein something in. Rage, maybe. Or understanding.
“I—I don’t remember ever reading it. But it was here, all this time.”
I pull back slightly, just enough to look up at him. His expression is unreadable, but his jaw is tight, his eyes sharp—focused on that one sentence like it’s a loaded weapon.
“Somehow, I missed it. I was too caught up being a stupid teenager to see it.”
Jayson looks at me for a long moment, then reaches out and closes the notebook gently in my hands.
“You were a kid,” he says. “Don’t put her fear on your shoulders. If she were afraid… that’s on whoever gave her a reason to be.”
My throat tightens.
“I wish I’d paid more attention to this?—”
“Keira,” he cuts in softly, firmly, “you can’t blame yourself.”
I don’t know what to say. So I say nothing.
Instead, I sink against him again, gripping the notebook like a lifeline.
And for the first time since Riley disappeared, I let myself grieve her—not as the mystery, not as the rumor, not as the cautionary tale. But as the girl who sat beside me in math class, drawing hearts in the margins. The girl who was scared. The girl who never got the chance to tell her story. But maybe… just maybe… I’ll tell it for her.
27
JAYSON
Timing. Timing is everything. It’s all about the timing—me meeting Keira, the impossible collision of her life with mine, and the vicious, cosmic joke of the circumstances. The irony.
The job should’ve been a straight line: in, bullet, out. Clockwork.
The mayor was just another stain. A necessary removal.
